Brad Edwards has been around the radial tire racing game for a long time. He was the first racer to dip into the three-second zone on a radial and his working man persona makes him a fan favorite. The one thing Brad didn’t have was a win at one of Donald Long’s events, but that changed at Lights Out 16. It’s been a long road to earning that black hat trophy, and Brad is ready to wear his with pride.

The Pro 275 class is brutally competitive and you need to be at the top of your game if you want to go rounds. Brad will be the first one to tell you, he’d been fighting his Team Z-built 1997 Mustang for a while trying to get it to perform. He’d made the switch to a 526 cubic-inch Brad Anderson-based Hemi and was chasing the suspension before Lights Out. A trip to see the team at Menser Motorsports gave Brad a fresh canvas to work with and that made a massive difference in how the Mustang behaved.

When Brad mixed all the ingredients together for his horsepower cake and baked them, the final result was a delicious 3.63 elapsed time at 219 mph at South Georgia Motorsports Park. This earned Brad the Pro 275 turbo combo class record and the number two qualifying spot at Lights Out 16.

“The car has been sneaking up on this level of performance since the fall, but nobody was paying attention. Since we left Menscer Motorsports, the car’s slowest 60-foot was a 1.03 and it made 17 straight passes without kicking the tires. The car did well at Bradenton and I knew we had a hot rod again,” Edwards explains.

The weather at Lights Out 16 was wild to say the least and no team had data for the DA readings they were seeing. Brad’s first test pass was a 3.83 at 187 mph, clicking the car off early and coasting across the finish line. At that point, Brad knew they had things figured out. Brad decided to make a full test pass with a lazy 60-foot tune up and the Mustang went 3.73, at that point he knew it was game on.

“The car is controlled by a Holley EFI system and the timing is managed by Davis Technologies products. I feel this is an outstanding combination and is a major contributing factor to our success. I was able to manipulate the right parameters with these products and execute my tuning plan. The result was a 3.66 at 213 in Q1 and then a 3.63 at 216 in Q2,” Brad says.

Things were looking up for Brad, he had the car back under his control and it was running well, but then everything went sideways after his round one win on Saturday. The Hemi decided it wanted to munch on some parts, but thankfully Brad had some spares and it was thrash time in the pits.

“I’ve got a great team and friends like Cord Collins and the Miller family. We got the car back to the pits and found the damage pretty quick. We pulled the head off and Jeff Miller brought us a fully assembled spare head to use. The piston was shot and the sleeve was damaged, so Cord put a fresh one in super-fast. We got everything put back together and ran a 3.71 to beat Bill Lutz the next round,” Brad states.

From that run forward, Brad and his Mustang was on mission and didn’t skip a beat. In the final, Brad lined up against the Pro 275 wrecking machine, Grantley Schloss. In a rare misstep, Grantley’s Nova spun at the hit, but it didn’t matter because Brad’s Mustang laid down another impressive run. And just like that, Brad had the win that he wanted so bad for so long.

“This win means everything to myself and my team. Lights Out is the Super Bowl of radial tire racing and winning that race is just huge. There’s a video of the starting line after we won and I can just close my eyes and listen to that on repeat because you can hear everyone screaming and how happy they are. Not to sound corny, but winning this race was a dream come true for us,” Brad says.

Brad Edwards earned his win at Lights Out 16 after years of dedication and hard work. Not many racers can say they’ve won at a Duck X Production event and Brad plans on cherishing his victory for the rest of his career.